page_title: The Nightmare
section_title: Interpretation
hierarchical_section_title: The Nightmare / Interpretation
caption_attribution_description: English: An unfinished painting on canvas, depicting a woman.
context_page_description: The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and apelike incubus crouched on her chest.
  The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success. After its first exhibition, at the 1782 Royal Academy of London, critics and patrons reacted with horrified fascination and the work became widely popular, to the extent that it was parodied in political satire and an engraved version was widely distributed. In response, Fuseli produced at least three other versions.
  Interpretations vary. The canvas seems to portray simultaneously a dreaming woman and the content of her nightmare. The incubus and horse's head refer to contemporary belief and folklore about nightmares, but have been ascribed more specific meanings by some theorists. Contemporary critics were taken aback by the overt sexuality of the painting, since interpreted by some scholars as anticipating Jungian ideas about the unconscious.
context_section_description: Contemporary critics often found the work scandalous due to its sexual themes. A few years earlier Fuseli had fallen for a woman named Anna Landholdt in Zürich, while travelling from Rome to London. Landholdt was the niece of his friend, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater. Fuseli wrote of his fantasies to Lavater in 1779; "Last night I had her in bed with me—tossed my bedclothes hugger-mugger—wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her—fused her body and soul together with my own—poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will.…"
  Fuseli's marriage proposal met with disapproval from Landholdt's father, and in any case seems to have been unrequited—she married a family friend soon after. The Nightmare, then, can be seen as a personal portrayal of the erotic aspects of love lost. Art historian H. W. Janson suggests that the sleeping woman represents Landholdt and that the demon is Fuseli himself. Bolstering this claim is an unfinished portrait of a girl on the back of the painting's canvas, which may portray Landholdt. Anthropologist Charles Stewart characterises the sleeping woman as "voluptuous," and one scholar of the Gothic describes her as lying in a "sexually receptive position." In Woman as Sex Object (1972), Marcia Allentuck similarly argues that the painting's intent is to show female orgasm. This is supported by Fuseli's sexually overt and even pornographic private drawings (e.g., Symplegma of Man with Two Women, 1770–78). Fuseli's painting has been considered representative of sublimated sexual instincts. Related interpretations of the painting view the incubus as a dream symbol of male libido, with the sexual act represented by the horse's intrusion through the curtain. Fuseli himself provided no commentary on his painting.
  Both the English word nightmare and its German equivalent, Albtraum (literally, "elf dream"), evoke the image of a malevolent being that causes bad dreams by sitting on the chest of the sleeper.
  The Royal Academy exhibition brought Fuseli and his painting enduring fame. The exhibition included Shakespeare-themed works by Fuseli, which won him a commission to produce eight paintings for publisher John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. One version of The Nightmare hung in the home of Fuseli's close friend and publisher Joseph Johnson, gracing his weekly dinners for London thinkers and writers. The Nightmare was widely plagiarised, and parodies of it were commonly used for political caricature, by George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, and others. In these satirical scenes, the incubus afflicts subjects such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis XVIII, British politician Charles James Fox, and Prime Minister William Pitt. In another example, admiral Lord Nelson is the demon, and his mistress Emma, Lady Hamilton, the sleeper. While some observers have viewed the parodies as mocking Fuseli, it is more likely that The Nightmare was simply a vehicle for ridicule of the caricatured subject. The Danish painter, Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, whom Fuseli had met in Rome, produced his own version of The Nightmare (Danish: Mareridt) which develops on the eroticism of Fuseli's work. Abildgaard's painting shows two naked women asleep in the bed; it is the woman in the foreground who is experiencing the nightmare and the incubus—which is crouched on the woman's stomach, facing her parted legs—has its tail nestling between her exposed breasts.
  Fuseli painted other versions of The Nightmare following the success of the first; at least three survive. The other important canvas was painted between 1790 and 1791 and is held at the Goethe Museum in Frankfurt. It is smaller than the original, and the woman's head lies to the left; a mirror opposes her on the right. The demon is looking at the woman rather than out of the picture, and it has pointed, catlike ears. The most significant difference in the remaining two versions is an erotic statuette of a couple on the table.
caption: The unfinished painting from the back of The Nightmare's canvas
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